


Four in Hand, Forever in His Heart

by Rydain



Category: The Sexy Brutale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet Ending, Drabble Sequence, Gen, Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 08:11:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14304492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rydain/pseuds/Rydain
Summary: Memories and mementos of a life well lived with Greyson.





	Four in Hand, Forever in His Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Playing the Hand You're Dealt](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11818863) by [Nikkusama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nikkusama/pseuds/Nikkusama). 



A scrapbook in sepia with the vibrance of color, its soft edges sharp as those perpetual yesterdays. Poses against the backdrops of portrait studios, on the steps of theaters and the balconies before skylines. Among friends in salons and smoky back rooms where their careful arm's length grew closer and their hands might dare to touch. Then laced together as they stood among flowers with misty eyes and broad smiles, with a cheeky old priest who thought the greatest of all things to be love and the heart of the word to beat well below the surface of its letter.

* * *

The finely carved cane of walnut Greyson had begun to carry after his curled beard went white and his jaunty step sprung a hitch. His suit of bottle green and gold pinstripe, still as debonair as that day he strutted up for a round of blackjack, hung alongside button shirts and sweater vests long since bought a size down for shoulders gone slighter in their sturdiness. His opera shoes of black velvet and satin trim, his silver ear hoops and signet rings, worn as easily for a stroll down the streets of Belgravia as for the bacchanalia of Bondes' Brutale.

* * *

Their bespoke masks from those grand old soirees, rich purple ram's horns and layered plates of steel, all but incognito but so enticing in their theatrical guise. How they had crept into every nook and trap door of that sprawling estate after Greyson's nose for its buried treasures. How they had danced on the deck of that ship as it creaked at its unraveling seams, as it sunk beneath the weight of its vice. How lucky that it had joined them as friends and partners and clandestine lovers, and left them a breath of due time to escape the undertow.

* * *

A deep roguish voice still whispering to Redd in the lamplight as he leafed through his collection of autographs from singers accompanied in the West End, as he relaxed with a careworn hardback and delicate cup of tea in his wing chair from their first bachelors' flat. As he sat at the piano in the parlor for a Chopin nocturne or a composition for Greyson's ears only, hands a touch behind the metronome though yet as precise as those light fingers were with a lockpick. Even now, some years past that quiet last morning.

_Hell of a show, old chap._


End file.
